


Blood, I Want It (Take me to the sky)

by KaRaEa



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, BAMF Tony Stark, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Canon-Typical Violence, Civil War Team Iron Man, Extremis Tony Stark, Gen, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22389361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaRaEa/pseuds/KaRaEa
Summary: Nobody from Tony's past ever stays dead, redemption is a lie, and Tony would really like a burger now please.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 545
Collections: Best Team Iron Man, Team tony favs, Tony Cinematic Universe One-Shots





	Blood, I Want It (Take me to the sky)

**Author's Note:**

> So this was originally gonna be another 'Tony gets his groove back' type fic loosely inspired by Cordelia Chase yelling at an old lady ghost (if you watched Angel: The Series then you'll know exactly the scene I'm talking about) but then it got dark. Tony may or not be a villain by the end of this. Fair warning.
> 
> Also, author is Team Iron Man, read at your own peril. 
> 
> Title from Meg Myer's 'Curbstomp'. Great Tony-appropriate angsty lyrics and bonus video of a girl being beaten up by stuffed toys.

Tony can feel the build up of guilt, the bile at the back of his throat as the sea of reporters pokes and prods at him over the Avengers, the Accords, Germany. Blames him now that the American government has made it all too clear they won't let the blame rest with any of the other, now pardoned, Avengers. The structured part of the press conference is over and now it's a free for all of vultures ripping into his weak spots.

He lets the others around him answer the questions they can, doesn't bother to try to defend himself from the implicit accusations in the Avengers' answers.

It's too much, even without having to go back to the compound with them after this. His break up with Pepper is still smarting and as unprocessed as the still-packed suitcases he'd left with that sits on the floor by his bed. 

She took everything, and he willingly gave it. All his shares are hers now, association with him cost the company and its employees too much this time and he's pragmatic enough to let it go. The tower was only ever really a home because of her presence anyway, and she was as much behind its construction as he was, not to mention it's S.I property. That's hers now, too.

The manor, though it's still his and still standing, is a no-go and his finances are on hold until the U.N works out how much of the damage at Lepzeig he needs to pay for.

He'd have called Rhodey, knows that the man's endless forgiveness for him would hold out yet again, but he can't face him after what he dragged him into. So the compound it is. 

It's what he deserves, isn't it? All those years of arrogance and now he's paying for it all. 

He ignores the muttered conversations that follow in his wake as he makes his way through the building, back to his workshop. The bots are there, at least. And FRIDAY.

He feels like a ghost sometimes. Like Tony Stark died in Siberia, leaving behind his legacy, his fame, his presence. All that's left is this pathetic shell that still favours his left side while the two supersoldiers who caused the damage are long since healed.

The braces for Rhodey were shipped out almost as soon as he was out of the hospital after Siberia, some of his best work, but still not good enough. It could never be good enough. So he pulls out the work he's been doing on neural uplinks. If he can get this right, can adapt it to work with the internal implants he's already designed, Rhodey won't need an exoskeleton or a wheelchair or any other kind of external help. He'll be able to walk again just as easily as ever. Do a fucking backflip if he wants to.

"FRIDAY, get ready for testing sequence twelve," Tony instructs and pulls out the lastest cocktail of techno-virus and extremis. This is gonna hurt.

He injects the solution and prepares himself for the burn. The fire of the extremis as it heals the tears in his brain and nervous system the nanite-virus rips open and inserts itself into. Hopefully this time it won't be for nothing. Hopefully this time it'll work.

The pain is excruciating. More than on a level with anything that happened in Afghanistan. More painful than Steve's shield pushing the reactor casing into his chest like it had never been removed. It feels like every nerve in his body is being burned in fucking hellfire. And just as the pain reaches its peak, the rawness of his screaming throat buried beneath it all, his brain ignites. Exploding outward as if his skull isn't even there. As if he's been shot in the head and the rest of his body just doesn't know it yet. 

For a moment he thinks it kills him.

Everything goes black, and then he's looking at his body from the outside.

A voice like binary in an Irish accent breaks through the roaring. **_I've alerted medical. Help is coming, Boss._**

And then he's back in his own body, skin feeling oversensitised and mouth tasting of copper. He blinks, feeling his body slowly come back under his control and breathes as deep as he can down into his still-constricting diaphram. "Call them off, Fri. I'm fine."

FRIDAY doesn't acknowedge him, but he knows that she's done what he's asked.

He looks at the implants on the workspace in front of him. Takes another breath. Reaches for them as he'd reach for the muscles in his eyebrow when he was teaching himself to raise just the one. Unfamiliar pathways lighting up, a faint sense of strain and strangeness and he can feel the implants respond. He starts to grin with triumph. It worked, he did it, it wor-

His mind explodes outwards again, everything fast and bright and overwhelming, a scattered white noise of numbers and electricity.

When he comes to himself again, Tony's in medical. "Shit," he croaks, and pushes himself up.

FRIDAY won't have told them what happened, what he was doing down there. Her programming won't let her however much she might want to. She'll have only even been able to override his order about caling off medical once he passed out and that order isn't written into her core like the protection of his work is.

He doesn't wait for someone to come check on him, doesn't bother to let anyone know he's leaving, just unhooks himself from the monitors and swings his feet to the floor. "FRIDAY, prep for uplink testing. Phase two."

He brushes off the worried medical personnel that shadow him to the door, asking that he go back to bed and stay for more tests or whatever else they want from him. He doesn't make it more than three feet down the corridor before the alarm sounds to assemble. The Avengers are needed, and the U.N's Accords council were very clear about what would happen if they went out without Tony, U.S and Wakandon pardons be damned.

Tony recognises the face that greets him across the fear filled shopping mall. It still haunts his dreams at night, and in all honesty this is one villain using him as their origin story that probably deserves to. "Hey, Jimmy. Long time no see."

The soldier turns a hate filled glare on him, the side of his face a mess of shrapnel scars. "Mr. Stark. You remembered. I'm honoured. Must be hard to keep track of us all these days, right?"

Steve takes his eyes off the hostile to turn a judgemental gaze on Tony. "You know each other?"

"I'd like to say I'm one of the first lives Mr. Stark here ruined, but I'd be taking that honour from whatever poor bastard first got hit by one of his weapons," Jimmy says. "I might be the first one he knew by name, though."

Tony doesn't say anything. The guilt for Jimmy and his unit is an old wound. Never fully healed, but one he's had so long he barely notices the pain anymore. As he watches him it's hard to separate his scarred face from the blood covered kid from his nightmares. 

"What are you doing here, kid?" Clint asks kindly. He's always kind to the people Tony's fucked over. Considers them to have something in common, probably.

"Well, Mr. Stark's such a busy and important guy," Jimmy says, a mocking parody of his old hero worship in his tone. "I had to get his attention somehow."

"I thought you were dead, you died in Afghanistan," Tony says, voice not quite neutral. "What happened?"

Jimmy laughs and it's not a happy sound. "I wish I had. And soon you will too."

The fight is brutal. Jimmy's come back with some cool new powers, as every goddamn person from Tony's past seems to these days. Tony half thinks the Avengers will leave him to it once it becomes apparent that Jimmy's only really interested in Tony, not the civilian hostages he took that alerted the Avengers to his existence. Maybe the potential collateral damage is something they actually consider this time though, because they stick around long enough to be beaten into the ground by Jimmy's telekinesis, the well oiled team they used to be falling apart easily into its pre-fractured pieces as he takes out the weakest members first.

The Captain goes down and then it's just Tony and Wanda left. The armor's gone. Ripped from him piece by piece under Jimmy's power. Wanda's the only threat left to Jimmy. She was possibly the only real threat to begin with. 

He sees it the moment she makes her decision. She never really got past her vendetta, whatever she might have convinced everyone else of. It was always there whenever she looked at him, spoke to him. It's no surprise, no betrayal when she stands down.

"Take him," Wanda says, her Sokovian accent stronger than usual. "I won't stop you."

Jimmy grins and tilts his head as he looks down at Tony. "You may as well end it yourself, you know," he tells him. "Your friends here don't have to suffer that way. I won't hurt them."

Tony looks around at the Avengers, all in various states of unconsciousness or incapacity. Natasha's bleeding, hips pinned by a vending machine Jimmy flung her way when she tried to get close. She's not even looking at Tony, calculating glare firmly fixed on her opponant, only the occassional wince of pain disrupting it.

"That's what you keep saying now, isn't it? That you won't keep causing so much damage," Jimmy continues. "That people won't get hurt because of you again. So prove it." He unstraps a knife from his boot and personally hands it to Tony, assured in his current state that Tony can't use it against him. 

Tony takes it. It would be easier, wouldn't it? Than to keep on as he has been? And he deserves it after all the pain he caused. He'd thought after Yinsen that he'd earn his way to forgiveness, to clearing the red in his ledger as Natasha liked to say. He'd kept on believing that right up until Sokovia, and he'd pretended he believed it long past then. But it wasn't true. Nothing could ever wash away all the red on his hands.

**_...Boss..._ **

He blinks hard to clear away the rush of static in his head.

"Come on, Mr. Stark. You're the Merchant of Death, right?" Jimmy says. "Time to sample your own product. Asshole."

**_...Boss, can you hear me?..._ **

"Please," Tony says, and he doesn't even know what he's begging for. 

"Tony..." Natasha gasps out, blood flecking her perfect lips.

He doesn't know whether she's telling him to do it, or telling him not to.

Wanda, though. She doesn't bother with ambiguity. "You wanna be a hero for once in your life? Now's your chance. Don't waste it."

Tony freezes. _Don't waste it._

He looks dispassionately down at the knife. _Is this what you wish the legacy of the Great Tony Stark to be?_

Something in his face must show that he's done, because Jimmy all but crows with delight, Wanda's vicious smirk flickering at the edges of her mouth.

"There you go," Jimmy says.

Too bad he's not that kind of done. 

_Don't waste your life._

Tony flips the knife in his hand and throws it at Jimmy.

Jimmy, of course, stops it with his telepathy, but Tony hadn't expected anything else. "Do you want your friends to die?"

Tony glances around, eyes lingering just a moment on Natasha's face. He shrugs. "They're not my friends."

**_...Boss, try to focus..._ **

**I'm here, Fri.**

It's strange. He'd never expected the uplink to be this... much. It's clear now, what that exploding, expanding feeling had been. Where all those numbers had been coming from. He should have recognised his baby girl sooner. And his boys. And every other line of code from every other piece of tech in the compound. 

Right now the noise around him isn't as strong. Only a few computers. Some security systems. And the nanites running through his blood, multiplying like cells but faster, enmeshed in his nervous system in ways he'd never come close to predicting. He flexes his fingers and feel them line up under his skin like chain mail. He knows every schematic he's ever made by heart. Every weapon, every suit, every system. The nanites in his brain know them, too.

Jimmy laughs again. "You really are an asshole."

Tony grins right back. "Damn straight."

Wanda, either out of her own hatred or out of some twisted desire to save her friends, acts before Jimmy does, a screech of rage building along with her red mist of power.

Tony blinks and the comms unit in her ear sparks and produces a high pitched whine that Tony doesn't have to hear to know will hurt.

Wanda's screech turns into a scream and she cluches at her head.

Jimmy looks confused at the sudden change, distracted for just long enough.

Tony swings at him. 

The punch lands with more force than any human blow should, shattering bone and sending Jimmy hurtling backwards. 

It buys him time, instructions racing through his head, through the technology inside him, faster than thought. As fast as a light switch turning on its light.

"You know," Tony says as Jimmy picks himself up, scrambles to his feet with a look of incandescent rage over his ruined face. "I've been thinking a lot about the first guy to tell me to be a hero."

He can feel FRIDAY in his head, like her voice in the suit or her code on a screen in front of him. Can feel how fast his body is changing now.

"He saved my life. Told me not to waste it. He told me I could be something more," Tony continues. "Do something more with my life. Make amends."

_This was always the plan, Stark..._

Jimmy practically spits as he raises his hand to send glass and metal hurtling at Tony. "You-"

The nanites rise through his skin and Jimmy's projectiles fall uselessly to the floor. Tony flexes his hand again and the gauntlet forms. "He was a liar."

The repulsor blast takes Jimmy off guard, his eyes widened with shock right up until the blast hits him, full force, in the chest. Tony knows it kills him. 

"Bye, Jimmy," Tony says, and lets the gauntlet slip back underneath his skin.

**_SHIELD are on their way, Boss._ **

**Thanks for the warning, Fri.**

"Tony," Natasha gasps again. "What..."

Tony lifts the vending machine off her with ease, letting it crash down to the side of her. "Anything broken?"

"My leg," Natasha grits out, pain shining in the sweat on her brow.

Tony alerts the incoming medical team with a thought and looks at Wanda.

She cowers, blood dripping from her ears. There's no sign of her magic, though Tony's sure it'll be back just as soon as she can focus through the ringing in her ears.

He turns his attention back to Natasha. "I think I'm done being a hero," he tells her.

She doesn't answer, though a fear matching Wanda's enters her eyes.

He hasn't done building the new suit yet, only even aware it was possible a few short moments ago, so he lets FRIDAY envelop him in the one she's had inbound since the moment Jimmy disabled him, and he launches himself through the roof.

God, he'd kill for a burger right now.


End file.
